OC Refund Policy
Introduction In any game whose setting is based around conflict, there will be consequence, sometimes violent, sometimes tragic. With this in mind it has always been possible for the player of an OC to kill off that OC at their discretion and the discretion of character staff, but even though our setting is a cosmic war, our casualty count remains vanishingly low. On examination one of the reasons that OCs rarely if ever die, even though they are permitted to, is that it would waste the AP invested in them. As satisfying as it might be dramatically, there is no numerical advantage to bringing a character to a meaningful closure, over simply having them go upstairs and not come back down. Even if the "upstairs forever" character is never played again, the player can at least tell themselves that their AP isn't wasted because "maybe I'll play that guy more in the future sometime." Often this never happens, and the vanished character stays on the lists forever as a manifestation of sunk cost fallacy. Perhaps more significantly, the creation of OCs is also affected by the problem of sunk costs. It can be very challenging to settle on an OC that you actually want to send in for, because AP spent on them is spent forever. If you're wrong about your OC, and decide you don't like it as much as you thought you would, you might find it difficult to then make a different concept you might like better, because you already spent your AP on the first one. Policy In order to address both these issues, we are implementing a new policy: CP Recycling. The CP Recycling Policy permits players to request that an OC be "recycled." If the staff approves the request, upon that OC's death (or permanent exile, erasure from the timeline, or what-have-you), 80 percent of the CPs listed in !charcost over their normal starting budget are made available to the player to use on another new OC. For example, let's say you have an OC named Slapjack. !charcost Slapjack shows that his total cost is 103, and since he is normal size, not a human or aien, and was not built using the sweep or seeker packages, Slapjack has a starting budget of 80CP. This means that Slapjack contains 23 additional CP worth of AP from his creation, upgrades, or both. Slapjack could be recycled to use 80 [percent of those 23CP, rounded down, (for a total of 18 additional CP) on a new OC by the same player. A "recycle request" is basically the same as an upgrade request, and is composed in much the same way. The request email should be titled with the name of the character and that it is a recycle request, and the body should include a brief description of how you, the player, intend for Slapjack's story to come to an end. This is to make sure that character death, a valuable dramatic motivator and plot hook, is used well. "He falls down the stairs one day" would not be an approvable request, for instance. Alternately, the player can ask for the character they want to recycle to be added to the "deadpool." The deadpool is a list of characters who will die, and on their death, have their CP recycled back to the player, but the player does not know the time, the place, or the means of the eventual outro. Instead the character's swan song will be reserved by TPstaff and written into a TP to be used as a plot hook or for dramatic tension, noble sacrifice, tragedy, what-have-you. This way the player doesn't have to come up with their own story for the character's demise, and the plotstaff will be able to kick certain plots up a notch by drawing from the deadpool for casualties. Value The resulting CP value is 80% of the character's extra CP cost. Check the !charcost for the OC, and remove their base cost (80 for regular robots, 58 for regular humans, etc). The remainder is the CP value of their upgrades''(and/or additional CP they added at chargen)''. Multiply this sum by .8, and round down to the nearest whole CP. EXAMPLE 1 Subject: Slapjack - Decepticon - Recycle Request Body: I haven't been interested in playing Slapjack for a long time, and I think I'd like to try something different and have access to the CP I put into him back when. I heard from First Aid that the Protectobots arrested Franklin Cross, and the Autobots might get kicked off of Earth by the human governments. I was thinking I'd have Slapjack break into Iacon and try to assassinate Cross to really piss off the Earth leaders! He'd fail, of course, since he's not an infiltrator, and he would get really close, but end up being killed by the Autobots. Maybe this could push the plot a little further? I think it would be an interesting end for Slapjack since he's always trying to instigate trouble between the Bots and their allies. EXAMPLE 2 Subject: Slapjack - Decepticon - Recycle Request (Deadpool) Body: I'm not really into this character anymore and I think I'd like to try something different using his CP. Can you add him to the deadpool, please?